GENRE ANALYSIS 1

Roosa Yloenen

RWS 1302

Bibhushana Poudyal

October 10, 2019

Memes have unnoticedly established themselves in our everyday communication. They can

be spotted everywhere from school halls to advertisements and to your grandma’s Facebook page.

At a glance one might see memes as a modern version of joke books or a way to amuse oneself –

and I’m not denying that. Memes have so many other abilities as well, and it is up to their creator to

decide how they want to take advantage of those powers. Because of the subtle ways memes

influence us I found this topic fascinating enough to make a college assignment out of them.

In this assignment I will be analyzing two different pieces: one being a popular social media

website, Reddit, and the other one being a traditional newspaper article from The Atlantic. Reddit is

divided into hundreds of thousands of subreddits, which are usually dedicated to a single topic. I

will be focusing on the subreddits /r/teenagers, /r/me_irl and r/depression_memes. Although only

one of those subreddits seems targeted to teenagers, all three concentrate on content appealing to

older adolescents and young adults. The contents of these subreddits are updated dozens of times a

day and I’m therefore limiting my research for posts made in September 2019. The article, “Suicide

Memes Might Actually Be Therapeutic” is written by Elizabeth Anne Brown and was published on

February 15, 2019. Her main argument is that morbid suicide memes might seem worrisome at first

but could actually be beneficial to young adults to explore their thoughts and feelings. The two

genres differ greatly from one another. Fundamentally, Reddit provides the results of the

phenomenon whereas the article delivers explanations, justifications and scientific reasoning behind

them.
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For my generation memes are an essential part of our life. We are being bombarded with

them hundreds of times a day in different ways. We are able to have a full conversation by using

only memes. Safe to say, we are very accustomed to them. In the three subreddits the contents are

very similar to one another: they are very heavy-hearted and almost toxically pessimistic. Common

topics are climate change, depression, suicide, loneliness and relationship issues, to name a few.

Memes offer a way to open up about these tough topics and to cope with them, while keeping the

conversation cheerful. Anyone with a free Reddit account is able to comment these posts. This way

people are able to connect and empathize with others struggling with the same thoughts, issues and

emotions. That works as a free group therapy that’s accessible to everyone, everywhere.

Some memes are more accessible to the masses whereas some are far more niche, requiring

specific previous knowledge. Therefore, the audience can range from a small group of friends to a

whole nation for instance. The memes on these subreddits are targeted to appeal to those with

similar kinds of thoughts: young adults struggling with depression, anxiety and maybe even suicidal

thoughts. The rules of these subreddits require that the topics of the memes fit their certain frames.

For instance, r/depression_memes accepts only memes about depression. Any off-topic memes will

for that reason not be tolerated. This restricts the discourse community a great deal.

If Reddit provides the answer to “how”, the article “Suicide Memes Might Actually Be

Therapeutic” (Brown, 2019) offers a “why”. The article is from the official website of The Atlantic

newspaper. In the article the author Elizabeth Anne Brown claims that suicide memers

are “commiserating and bonding over being suicidal” and these dark memes can actually be an

efficient way to reach out to these “vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations: socially isolated

young people”. The intended audience is most likely the parents of these suicide memers. They

might be worried that these toxic-looking memes are doing no good to their kids and could even be

harming them by worsening their already melancholic thoughts. Brown’s text offers these parents a

way to see the topic through their children’s eyes and maybe find a way to understand them better.
GENRE ANALYSIS 3

Memes are most commonly shown as image macros: a picture superimposed with text. They

are remixed, shared and remixed again at the hands of someone else. Memes rely on images and

very few words. The text is there to create context rather than to tell the joke. In social media,

where they are most common, their audiences don’t have the time or the interest to read long

phrases, so the creators of memes have to rely on the image’s capability of sending a message.

Brown’s article is completely different from memes. She decides to include no photos or memes

and paraphrases them or leaves the reader some links instead. The focus is completely on the text as

she relies on text’s ability to persuade and tell a story.

The style of language for both of these genres are significantly different from one another.

Brown’s text is strictly professional and academic. However, she doesn’t censor any profanities and

she does include some internet slang terms here and there, which is fitting to the topic. The typeface

is insignificant and clear; very typical for a newspaper article. The focus isn’t on the visuals but the

contents of the text itself. Memes are on the complete other end of the spectrum. Misspells are

highly common, sentences are oftentimes a few words long at most, they are packed with specific

lexis and can also be very absurd. Formalities or informalities are used as a tool of rhetoric. The

most common font used is Impact, which stands out even when layered over images. The typeface

can also be used as a tool to emphasize certain words, ideas or thoughts. It’s safe to say, that the

style of the text plays a great role in presenting the idea of the meme.

Along with the elements of these two genres, the discourse communities of them contrast

one another. Modern memes are commonly mashups of other memes, which demands a familiarity

with all the memes involved in order to be comprehended, making the discourse community

narrower. The memes on these three subreddits are mainly accessible for anyone. The memes on

r/teenagers are a bit more niche, because they are directed to modern, socially aware teenagers. The

article, on the other hand, doesn’t require that much previous knowledge from the reader. The

author explains the phenomenon thoroughly, although she does presume the reader has at least
GENRE ANALYSIS 4

some experience from the internet communities as she doesn’t clarify many of the terms or websites

mentioned, such as “dark web”, “4chan” or “trolling”. She therefore acknowledges that her average

reader is more of a bystander or a casual consumer when it comes to memes, who merely wants to

broaden their knowledge of the subject.

Brown persuades the reader in various ways. She keeps the arguments clear from any

emotional manipulation and sticks to credible data. She doesn’t try to evoke any emotional response

in her readers and therefore doesn’t include much emotionally loaded language. Brown rather aims

to evoke a logical response through the heavy use of data and testimonies. She interviews many

mental health specialists, cites World Health Organization data and the Centers for Disease Control

and Prevention, making the text seem almost scholarly. The author includes her own case study of-

a-kind in the text, which works well to establish a sense of expertise around her as well.

Memes have an impeccable ability to take a firm grip of their audience’s heartstrings as well

as logical reasoning. They can bombard ignorant readers with disinformation masked as facts. They

can use satire and humor to pinpoint faults in the society and therefore evoke a logical or emotional

response. In these three particular subreddits the target is mainly to use humor to persuade

audiences. A meme about having no reasons to live and wanting to commit suicide first makes the

reader laugh, then realize there’s an actual truth behind it. This way the reader begins to think about

it deeper and maybe see depressed people in a different light. I have never had anxiety, but through

memes I was able to understand my anxiety-suffering friend’s emotions and struggles better.

Structure-wise these two genres are far from each other. Brown can expect that the average

reader will have the interest to spend a good couple of minutes on an article. This way she can write

longer phrases, cover a lot of content in the paragraphs and analyze the topic very thoroughly.

Memes, however, must grab the viewer’s attention straight away, or wither. An average user

browses through dozens of memes a minute, so it is fundamental that the attention is grabbed

straight away. The internet world is very harsh on memes: the best receive upvotes, likes, retweets
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or shares – growing more and more popular. The info must therefore be brief and easily accessible.

There is absolutely no room for long build-ups of punchlines. The only thing that restricts memes

are the subreddit rules, which are stated clearly on the right-hand side of the website. Violations

result in the thread being deleted. For the article, the boundaries are set by the publisher – The

Atlantic – and the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists.

I wouldn’t consider memes as a credible source of empirical or objective information, but

they are a great way to present ideas, give voice to painful feelings and find empathy. What memes

lack, newspaper articles fill and vice versa. I still find most newspapers, such as The Atlantic,

credible enough to be trusted as a source of factual information. What they lack is the emotion and

personal resonance, which is where memes shine like no other. Together, these two highly

contrasting genres bring a balance of highly subjective and emotional as well as objective and

apathetic information.
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References

Brown, E. A. (2019). Suicide memes might actually be therapeutic. The Atlantic. Retrieved from

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/suicide-memes/582832/

r/teenagers. Reddit. Reddit, Inc. [Discussion board]. Accessed October 6, 2019 from

https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/

r/depression_memes. Reddit. Reddit, Inc. [Discussion board]. Accessed October 6, 2019 from

https://www.reddit.com/r/depression_memes/

r/me_irl. Reddit. Reddit, Inc. [Discussion board]. Accessed October 6, 2019 from

https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/